


This Business of Humanity

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Deception, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Implied/Referenced Killing, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sexism, Implied/Referenced miscarriage, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Partner Betrayal, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 13:02:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3897328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“I love you. Holy Sina, you know I’m not lying about that, don’t you?”</i> </p><p>
  <i>When she looks at him he suddenly realizes she might not actually know. But that’s not what she says. She says, dully and with profound sorrow, “I wouldn’t be your first beloved you’d destroyed. Would I?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Business of Humanity

**Author's Note:**

> The OP of [the kinkmeme prompt](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/8414.html?thread=6962142#cmt6962142), wanting a change from original characters raping or torturing Armin, called for "something where the OC is really nice, cares about Armin, and actually has a perfectly healthy relationship with him." Note that they didn't specify that Armin had to be perfectly nice to the OC....

**_spring 858_ **

Armin throws his right arm over his eyes. “It never ends, does it?”

He can feel as well as hear Margaret chuckle; she’s lying on her stomach, and her left side’s pressed against his left side from shoulder to hip, her skin warm in the cool of the room. “Well, of course it doesn’t. Not so long as humanity doesn’t end.”

“But…” He removes his arm to scowl at the ceiling. “It’s so _tedious._ Arguing with egotists and grandstanders and petty point-scorers all day over things like how much money for new sewers next year, and how many square meters a tavern can occupy in a residential neighborhood, and the grade of stone with which to pave the new roads in the reclaimed territories...”

She says nothing, and he turns his head to look up at her. Her smile is enigmatic.

Margaret Preston Lehrer is a woman of many smiles. There’s the genuinely delighted smile she has for those she’s fond of. There’s the bland, fixed smile she wears at public events, also the perfect smile for when she catches Armin’s eye during a session while one of the grandstanders is an hour into his tirade and she moves her fist under the table like a man jerking off, trying to make Armin laugh out of turn. There’s her dagger-pointed grin, which unlike her other smiles doesn’t reach her eyes. There’s her wry grin, which he sees more of than any other. And there’s the soft, soft smile that, these days, he’s the only one to see.

He’s learned to pay the most attention to the enigmatic smile, because it’s the one that signals he’s about to learn something from her.

“It’s not exciting,” she says. “Not like killing titans. Or killing people. Do you wish you were still doing those things, Armin?”

His eyes widen, and he sits up on his elbows. “Of course I don’t,” he says, shocked at the question.

She shrugs the bare shoulder nearer him, just slightly. “Well, then. This is what you and your comrades killed them all for. It’s the business of humanity. Come to terms with it. Or quit Parliament altogether. Between the Foreign Service and the Exploration Legion, Historia could keep you more than busy.”

He sighs. “I can’t.”

She snorts. “You don’t _want_ to.”

“Well, true, I don’t want to. But I don’t want to abandon you there.”

Her pale brows disappear into her hairline. “I beg your pardon? I was holding my own there quite well before you ever attended a session.”

“Of course you were,” he says with an utter lack of his old fluster, “but the Survey Corps taught me not to abandon my comrades on the battlefield.”

He’s gotten better at answering her smoothly than the first time he met her. He was just shy of seventeen then, and she was twenty-three. His final growth spurt had begun but it hadn’t yet added even five centimeters to his height, and his face was still round with baby fat. She was, is, nearly as tall as Erwin Smith was, with a sculpted oval face, hazel eyes, and hair the same color as Armin’s that cascaded down the back of her smart, severe dress jacket — she was still dressing in widow’s black in those days — in a thick, complex braid.

He’s forgotten precisely what he said to her upon their introduction. _So honored … a true hero …. daughter and widow of heroes … an inspiration…_ A mixture of genuine admiration, thickly laid-on flattery, and utter bullshit. A well-calculated one, he’d thought. Until she smiled at him, a veneer of faux-indulgent mockery over a deep brittleness, and she stooped and pinched his cheek. “Awww. Lookit the baby politician, imitating the grownups. So adorable.”

Snickers rose around them and echoed in the broad central hallway of what was then the new Parliament building. As she straightened and moved away down it with decisive, echoing clicks of her heels, Armin felt as hot as a steaming titan, and he wished the parquet floor would swallow him up.

He said nothing for his first few sessions, just watched. He wasn’t paying close attention to the actual issues; those, he could read up on in private. He was taking note of the empty vessels that made the most noise, the eloquent speakers whose words were finely wrought blades, the workhorses whose shoulders Parliament rested on, the quiet members who’ve continued to surprise him even five years later. 

Margaret was one of three women out of the sixty. All three could more than hold their own, but it cost them energy that it didn’t cost the men, energy that could have gone into better things. And all three were among the workhorses, if frequently dismissed by their colleagues as gilt-bridled parade horses.

During his fourth session, when one of the grandstanders — a pompous, mustachioed Sina noble in his forties — had interrupted Margaret for the third time and Armin could see the bland smile growing dagger points, he raised his hand. “If Lord Stauffer will forgive me, I believe the Honorable Mrs. Lehrer was trying to make a point. Her points are quite good — as are yours, my lord, but I suspect you and she might be on the same page, and perhaps we should hear her out.”

Stauffer glared at him, not used to being interrupted at all, let alone by an upstart from a Maria backwater. But, these days, nobles had begun to back down from Survey Corps veterans, even very young ones, and especially those with a hand in putting Historia Reiss on the throne. When Armin glanced at Margaret, he caught her regarding him with surprise: faint, quickly concealed, but unmistakeable.

At the end of the session he took his time gathering up the palimpsests on which he’d been scribbling notes, watching the others drift out of the chamber, noting who spoke to whom. Some of the other parliamentarians passed his seat on their way out, and he exchanged forgettable pleasantries with each while making mental notes: names, faces, districts, any comments they’d made.

The chamber was nearly empty when he heard a cultivated Sina voice at his right shoulder. “Lieutenant Arlert?”

Standing just behind him was a girl maybe a year older than he was, with brown hair and eyes and a solemn face. “Mrs. Lehrer requests your presence in her office.”

He blinked. “Is this an urgent matter… Miss… er…”

“Otthild Weiler, sir, Mrs. Lehrer’s personal assistant.” She smiled and somehow looked even more solemn than she had before. “If you’re available at the moment you can follow me.”

He’d planned to go back to his modest suite of rooms and review his notes, along with other paperwork, then later join several of the others at a nearby tavern for dinner, drink, and conversation. He rose, the bundle of palimpsests under one arm, and followed Otthild out of the chamber.

She led him down the main corridor, up a flight of stars, and down another corridor lined with doors. A first initial, period, and surname were inked, carefully if plainly, on each pane of door glass. His own office was at the very end, little more than a closet. Otthild stopped perhaps midway and rapped twice in quick succession on a door that read M. LEHRER.

“Yes?” came the muffled reply.

Otthild pushed the door open. “Lieutenant Armin Arlert, ma’am,” she announced.

The office was easily twice the size of Armin’s, though still not large. Most of it was taken up by a desk and the bookshelves that surrounded it. He forced himself not to gaze at them longingly, vaguely fearing he might start to drool. There was one small casement window, its halves open to let in the early-autumn air. The desk was strewn with paperwork and books. It also bore an inkstand, several quills, and a cup that looked as delicate as the flowers painted on it and that was half-full with liquid the color of a bay horse’s flank.

Behind the desk, Margaret Lehrer lifted her head, straightened her spine, adjusted the pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses on the bridge of her nose, and smiled. It was warmer than the bland smile of earlier, but Armin immediately caught the air of inquiry behind it.

“Lieutenant. Thank you for coming by.” She stood, towering over him, and extended a fair-skinned hand with long, tapering fingers. Armin stepped forward and took it. A quick squeeze, neither too limp nor too crushing — her wedding ring imprinted cold and hard against the ball of his hand — and release. He was finally managing to stifle the well-drilled impulse to salute senior parliamentarians instead of shake hands with them. He hadn’t yet shaken his surprise at how _soft_ all his new colleagues' hands were.

_Unlike rough fingertips trailing over his collarbone, a calloused palm sliding down his chest under his shirt…_ He shook the memory away just in time to hear the end of her question. “—some coffee?” 

It was one of the first things to have made its way past the Walls with the beginning, or rather the resumption, of trade with the outside world. For all that his former comrades lived on the stuff now, Armin couldn’t touch it; it honed his nerves to far too keen an edge and, when he drank it late in the day, cheated him of sleep.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Lehrer, I'm fine.” He’d have gladly taken a cup of tea instead, but he sensed it wouldn’t be the done thing to ask.

“Are you sure?” she asked. When he nodded, Margaret turned her head to the side. “That will be all for now, Otthild. Get yourself some dinner.”

“Ma’am,” Otthild said automatically with a deferential dip of her head before leaving the room.

Margaret’s eyes followed her until the door shut gently behind Otthild, then turned back to Armin. Without a pause she said, “That was a well-spoken intervention on my behalf this afternoon — and, if I were to be honest, I certainly gave you no reason to like me upon our introduction.”

Armin colored a little and forced himself not to shift from one foot to the other. “Well, I suppose I could have been… less florid upon our introduction.”

“You mean you could have put the stable shovel down first?” she asked mildly. When he turned a darker red, she grinned at him. “I must say, though, it was an _impressive_ laying-on of horseshit. And this is coming from one who has not only spent a year and a half in this den of iniquity but grew up surrounded by poets and novelists and broadside writers and pamphleteers.”

He laughed, as much relieved as amused. “Well. I hope to be a little less obvious with it henceforth.”

She snorted. “Oh, you’ve chosen the wrong profession for _that_ , if you were looking for role models.”

“Bad examples can be as educational as good ones,” Armin said lightly. She laughed at that — loudly and wholeheartedly, no polite giggle — and a mild but palpable sense of victory washed through him.

“So…” He supposed it was now safe to change the subject to what had to have been the hundreds of bound volumes in the shelves rising around them. He let his gaze brush over them, trying not to seem like a beggar child in a bakery. “Do most of these books come from your parents' shop?”

“No,” she said, sadness clinging to the underside of the word. “Most of their books didn’t survive the firebombings by the CMP.”

“Oh. Of course,” Armin said, feeling stupid. He’d heard about that when it happened. He’d learned that the mental image of thousands of books going up in flames could hit him as hard as the sight of a titan destroying a squad of soldiers.

“The silver lining is that they kept the heretical ones in a large steel safe, except for some that had been lent out. In the final analysis, only one or two were confiscated and destroyed. A tragic loss, but it could have been so much worse.” She paused, then added bitterly, “Would that we’d been so lucky with our human beloveds. Those books might as well have been written not in ink but in blood.”

“I'm sorry,” Armin said quietly. There was, he’d learned in the hardest of ways, nothing else one could really say in this situation.

She didn’t seem to him a woman who avoided people’s eyes, but her own gaze drifted away his face into the distance, unfocusing. He recalled all the times he’d had to look away from sympathy, or pity, in the eyes of others.

After a long minute, she looked at him directly again, her face strangely soft. “You know,” she said, “we’d all been wondering what happened to your grandfather. I hope he’s well?”

Armin’s head rose sharply. “My… _grandfather?_ ” Though he’d thought his voice had stopped cracking for good earlier in the year, the word came out with a pronounced squeak. But the way his chest was tightening around his suddenly pounding heart left no space in him for embarrassment.

Margaret frowned. “Your grandfather _was_ Joseph Arlert, yes? It’s not a common surname; I just assumed.”

“Y-yes. Yes, he was.” Armin swallowed. “I … didn’t know he was in your parents' circle.”

“Yes. For many years. He didn’t come often, of course; Shiganshina was a long distance away. But he’d join us at least once a month, and one of our friends would put him up for the night. I was about sixteen when he just stopped showing up. So you would have been…“

“…ten years old,” Armin whispered. When she said nothing, he continued. “They— they sent him out beyond the Walls. On the expedi—” He stopped abruptly, shook his head hard just once, and gave a laugh like acid bubbling up in one of Hange’s test tubes. “Oh, fuck it. You know the truth as well as I do. They sent him out to _die._ ”

He splayed his hand over his face. He no more wanted to look into her eyes than she’d wanted to look into his a moment before. He’d managed to obtain the gratitude of this clever, courageous, powerful woman; he’d even managed to charm her a little. He didn’t intend to dissolve into a pool of snot and tears in front of her.

When he’d gained a bit more control of himself, he lowered his hand. There was empathy in Margaret’s eyes, but other things as well. Thought, calm, understanding, strength. Things one could anchor oneself on.

“He must not have told you because he wanted to protect you,” she said softly. “We were all playing a dangerous game.”

“He should have,” Armin said, suddenly awash not only in renewed loss but a strange, bitter anger. “I wouldn’t have been the only child in that circle, would I have?”

“Lieutenant.” She spoke his title crisply. “My parents’ bookshop was in Rose, very close to Wall Sina. Not far from some of the Reiss lands, in fact. They were friends with many, many people. Some of them were of remarkable influence, when you consider the hazardous company they’d chosen to keep. A good number of them would have taken me in out of necessity. One _did_ , actually, and quite without the intent of eventually falling in love with me and marrying me. There were a few other children over the years, yes. They were, too, taken in by friends if they weren’t yet old enough to survive on their own.”

She paused. “Your grandfather was… a lovely man. Very intelligent, very kind, very devoted to bringing humanity out of its darkness behind the Walls. But he was one old, poor man, living out on the edge of civilization. If he was raising you, I presume your parents were deceased or missing. We knew nothing of you, and perhaps he wanted it that way — and, given that there turned out to be traitors among us, perhaps he was right. What would have happened to you, had the CMP taken him away?”

Armin didn’t reply for a long moment. Finally he said in a very small voice, “My… best friend’s parents would have taken me in. Just like they took in another friend of ours, when she was orphaned. But … ultimately, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

She closed her eyes so briefly before she opened them again, it could have passed for a blink. Sympathy, strength, thought, memories all shifted about in them, the way the brown and the green in them shift about, he’d come to learn.

Finally she said, smiling softly, “He used to give me sweets. He’d give all of us children a sweet every time we saw him. I don’t know how he afforded them. Sugar’s still not cheap, but it was prohibitively expensive back then.”

“Licorice drops,” Armin said. Didn’t ask.

“Yes. Licorice drops.”

“He made them himself,” Armin said, feeling the words begin to surge in his throat and a smile begin to play on his lips. “He’d run errands for people in Shiganshina when he went into Rose — he’d always just tell me it was ‘business’ and send me to my friend’s house for the night. Those people would give him things in return, like food or medicine. The baker would give him sugar. He grew licorice root in his garden. He made an essence out of it, and he’d add the essence to the boiled-down sugar before he baked the drops.” He closed his eyes, and a sudden, long-denied memory swelled in his breast and filled out his smile. “The kitchen used to smell so good, those days.”

When he opened his eyes this time, she was still smiling, and there was something new in her gaze as well.

“Lieuten—”

“Armin,” he said quickly.

“Well, then, Armin, I'm Margaret to you. And I should very much like the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight. Unless, of course, forward women offend your sensibilities.”

He laughed. “If I had such sensibilities I wouldn’t be alive today. That other orphaned friend of mine I mentioned? She’s now the Commander of the Exploration Legion.” She grinned at that, and he continued, “Unfortunately I do have plans for dinner. However, tomorrow night, I do not. Would you happen to be free then… Margaret?”

“Indeed, I would. I know of a lovely restaurant off the Reissplatz, and it would be my pleasure to take you there.”

His brows shot up. “‘Take me there'? No, I insist—”

“Armin.” Her own left brow was now cocked over that eye. “I _know_ how much a junior parliamentarian is paid. It’s not much. It’s not that I earn a great deal more, but between that and a modest inheritance, I manage. And, for what it’s worth, I invited you. The obligation is mine. And the pleasure as well.”

He wasn’t sure it was her frank assessment of his financial situation that was making him blush now, or… the word _pleasure_. The ghost of rough hands passed once more over his chest and sides. He blinked the sensation away and considered, not for the first time, that precious little of his romantic or sexual experience had involved women.

“Shall I meet you at the Reissplatz around nineteen hundred hours?” he asked.

“Seven o’clock would work fine,” she replied, meeting his smile with one of her own.

“Seven o’clock,” he echoed her deliberately. Some habits die hard, especially those cultivated for five years and more. 

As he turned to leave, she said, “Oh, and Armin?” He turned around to catch her grinning again. “A word of advice,” she said. “Either cut your hair shorter or grow it out. No man over the age of ten should wear it at that length.”

He flushed again, and it took his face a second to decide it was going to smile at that comment of hers, too. “Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned that you were forward.”

*

He experimented with cutting it a few times. Ultimately he decided to grow it out to just beneath his shoulders. He’s glad he did. He likes the feel of Margaret’s fist in it when he’s pushing her over the precipice with the edge of his tongue. Or when she’s grinding down on him from above and she begins to shudder hard and clench around him.

She leans toward him and weaves her fingers into it now, brushing her lips against his. One brush, two brushes, and on the third their tongues slide against one another. Her other hand molds itself around his shoulder, pulling him against her.

“Again already?” he murmurs.

“‘Already’? It’s been little more than an hour. The last time I checked you were still twenty-three and capable of a second round in that much time. Sometimes a third. Once in a great while, a fourth.”

The last time there was a fourth round Armin had trouble walking the following day. “Well… a second round, I think I can oblige you with. Possibly a third. The fourth rounds, I fear, are almost certainly a thing of the past.”

“Pity.” She nibbles his earlobe, just short of it actually hurting him. “I’ll have to find myself fresh junior parliamentarian meat.” He bursts out laughing against her throat. “Maybe as soon as tomorrow,” she says. “That new one, Elmbach—” 

_“Elmbach?”_ Five years ago he would have squeaked with the incredulity, facetious though it is; he’s still relieved when it no longer happens. “If you’re going to throw me over for someone younger, might I ask you to not insult me by doing so with someone who likely needs to be reminded to breathe regularly?”

“On the other hand, he’d never go soft on me by understanding the jokes I make, let alone laughing at them.” She squeezes his cock and he registers that his erection’s mostly gone.

“You’re probably right,” he concedes.

“Good thing that can be fixed.”

Margaret slides downward on the bed against him, flowing, streamlike. Just watching her lay her cheek against the top of his thigh drives the breath right out of Armin.

She smiles up at him, soft and lazy. “Hello,” she says, quiet and playful, and then her gaze drops. “And hello to you, too.” The touch of her lips to the head of his cock sends blood surging down into it. He drags in an uneven breath as he watches her eyes watch his, watches her hand curl around the base to guide it to her mouth, watches her lips separate to take the head in entirely.

He make a soft noise, half-groan and half-whimper, as she begins to suck on it gently and draws a light fingertip up and down the vein on the underside. His eyes close when the fingertip stops at his frenulum and begins to stroke back and forth across it.

Suddenly there’s cool air against the skin that’s been heated by his blood and her mouth. He opens his eyes to find Margaret smiling up again at him. “Aren’t you going to watch me?”

He returns a weak smile and nods, because speaking is a bit difficult right now. She slides her lips back over his cockhead, then takes nearly the rest of him into her mouth. Armin gasps as her lips close around him just short of the base and her eyes lift to his. They’re mostly green now. Very green. His mind, now practiced at the matter, shoves away invasive comparisons and focuses on their almond shapes, their dark-gold lashes. He shifts his eyes to her hollowed cheeks, her undulating lips, and what he can see of the working of her throat; he takes all of it in, meditates on it.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, the vowels straining like soldiers in flight, the consonants crumbling to powder. Margaret’s gaze, all cleverness and intensity as she studies his pleasure and calculates how to heighten it, comes unfocused. The sudden softness in it hits the center of his body like a storm and radiates outward. Then she cups his balls and slides her palm lightly back and forth over the sac, and he moans, faint and high-pitched.

She begins to fuck her own mouth on his cock, and he finds himself unable to not thrust upward to meet her halfway. She tolerates a bit of that before she gently pushes his hips back down to the bed. He squirms in her light grasp, whining and grunting when he feels the telltale flutters begin, broadening into spasms. “I'm close,” he gasps after three more downstrokes of her mouth, or maybe four, he doesn’t trust his own ability to count right now.

Margaret pulls off him a few seconds later with a lewd wet noise and wraps her long, soft hand around his spit-slickened cock. While she is not weak, she can’t finish him off with the violent, stunning speed that he himself could, or another soldier could ( _stop….stop_ ). But, with him perched just on the edge of orgasm, she easily brings him right over it. His come jets up her hand and wrist as he arches against her and makes broken sounds, teeth clenched and toes curled and eyes tightly shut.

Armin falls back to the bed, flat but for his heaving chest, half-deafened by his own pulse. Dimly he registers her moving upward again, reaching for a handkerchief on the nightstand to wipe her hands with, then her taking his right hand in her left in order to guide it. His fingertips come to rest against soft, divided warmth under a tuft of fine hair. Inhaling sharply to regather his wits, he turns on his side, pulling her against him with his left arm as his right fingers push inward.

The outer lips of her cunt envelop his fingertips as he glides them up and down her wet, wet cleft. She groans against the top of his head, rolling her hips against his touch, but he doesn’t give her what she wants, not yet. As he mouths one nipple and then the other, he finds her inner opening and gently inserts just the tips of two fingers, feeling her clench ineffectively at the too-shallow penetration. He eases them in further, and she bears down hard on his hand. When he curls them upward and presses, there’s a note of desperation in the noise she makes.

Satiated, he takes his time, draws her pleasure out for her as she did for him. He lets her rock against it until he senses she has reached a plateau, and then he shifts thumb and forefinger upward to surround her clit, working the flesh around it without touching it itself. She pushes her entire body against his now, huffing and whimpering into his hair.

They have been one another’s instruments for several years now, and just as a musician knows what note to come in on, he knows the precise moment to drag the edge of his thumbnail, ever so lightly, across the crown of her clit. She seizes up, cries out, and thrusts hard against the fingers moving inside her and the one teasing at her. He continues to work them and suck at her nipples as she rides out the orgasm against his hand, which is now thoroughly damp.

Finally she sags against him. He finds the handkerchief and blots his hand on the dry area that remains, then crumples it and tosses it to the floor before he fits himself against her again.

A very long time later, Margaret observes, “Dinner at the palace is in a few hours.”

Armin refuses to open his eyes just yet. “Can’t you just have Otthild bring us some dry sausage and winter apples and call it a night?”

“Very cute.” She slides away from him and stretches, back arched and head tilted, nicely displaying her breasts. He cups one on impulse; she pushes his hand away matter-of-factly and pulls herself into a sitting position. “Historia wants both of us there tonight. There’s an ambassador from a country across the ocean she wants you in particular to meet. Maybe he’ll invite you there and you can spend a month on a ship, marveling at all the water.”

He’s done that before. Somehow, despite having read of it in various books, he never considered that he might be afflicted with seasickness. He spent the voyage on deck, wrapped in a heavy cloak, frigid salt wind whipping his face and his eyes trained on the horizon, because it was preferable to lying belowdecks with his face in a bucket. Even if once in a while he still had to lean over the rail and befoul the blue beauty that is the sea.

“I’d rather stay here and marvel at you,” he says.

She lightly slaps the side of his head. “Fucking bullshit artist.” He grins and watches her move, long legs and round ass and back hollowed like a flute with her damp hair clinging to the top of it, across the bedroom until she disappears into the washroom and closes the door behind her.

 

**_autumn 858_ **

Armin has always had a light step, but he feels positively buoyant as he walks down the upstairs corridor of the Parliament building, like the sun and the blue sky are flowing through his veins. The only weight he feels is the slight, slight one of the tiny box, covered with velvet, in his left trouser pocket.

He’s within several doors of Margaret’s office when he hears voices, hers and another. Hers is crisp with an unusual frost. The other, which he recognizes immediately, is deep, blunt, and not one bit friendlier than hers.

Captain Levi Ackerman stands before her desk, back straight, arms folded over his chest, glaring down at her. The black hair falling around his face is now touched here and there with white, the hollows under his eyes deeper, the beginnings of lines bracketing his mouth. Margaret sits behind her desk, hands folded atop it, gazing up at him through her horn-rimmed glasses. She does not smile at all. Armin wonders why Mikasa, who has an excellent working relationship with her, sent Levi in her stead.

“—must understand that resources for all purposes, across all our lands, are strained at this juncture.” Margaret slides her eyes a bit past Levi to give Armin a curt nod of acknowledgment; he steps into the office and comes to stand perpendicular to both of them.

“Grain,” Levi snaps, not turning his head or even acknowledging the presence of a third person. “I'm not asking for gold ingots or crates of vine. I'm asking for basic fucking supplies so my men don’t starve.”

“They’ve got arms and ammunition already, I trust. They’re out in what are for the most part still extremely wild lands. They can hunt and fish and gather. That’s more than the people in the urban districts can do. Unless they’re up for hunting rats in the gutters and the sewers, they’re dependent on what they can buy, or on the grain dole.”

“Excuse me? You expect an enormous military division to survive only on what it can hunt and pick?”

“Captain,” Margaret says, her tone sharpening. “Has no one told you yet about the harvest?”

“No one’s had to tell me. After the wet, chilly summer we had, it’s got to be shit.”

“It’s considerably worse than just ‘shit,’” she says, letting anger touch the edge of her voice now. “It’s _blighted._ ”

Levi stares at her uncomprehendingly for a moment, then covers his face with his palm. _“Fuck.”_  He spits out the syllable like a fire casting out a spark.

Margaret waits a few beats, then continues, the anger banked slightly in studied neutrality. “Hunger throughout our territories is so severe that some have knowingly harvested, milled, and baked the blighted rye and wheat. I do not think they quite understand the danger. Or, rather, understood. The results of those actions have very likely made the folly clear to all.”

Armin shudders, remembering the tale of a man in Ehrmich who lost his mind after eating bread made from blighted rye. He heard it second-hand, as a parliamentarian from that district had witnessed it from a nearby streetcorner. The victim ran about in the street, twitching spasmodically, tearing off his clothes, screaming that his limbs were all on fire, screaming to people who weren’t there, violently attacking anyone who tried to calm and console him. A soldier shot him down, as much out of pity as out of fear.

“What about past-year reserves?” Levi demands.

“The undamaged grain silos have been depleted,” Margaret replies tersely.

“‘Undamaged’?”

“Yes. Undamaged. A cluster of silos in Chlorba incurred structural damage during the late war. They collapsed earlier this summer, in the middle of the night. The grain spilled and was eaten or carried off by animals before anyone was aware of the collapses.”

Levi stares at her in disbelief. “The war ended more than seven fucking years ago. Nobody bothered to maintain those silos in the interim? And nobody in your government, Mrs. Lehrer, saw fit to tell the rest of us when they fell down?”

Margaret is silent for a long moment, during which she regards Levi coolly and with no expression whatsoever. Armin is one of the few people who understands how much anger this particular façade of hers conceals.

“The damage,” she finally says, “consisted of hairline cracks in the foundations, hidden from casual observation, that broadened over time. Resources in general have been stretched so thin since then that a great deal of maintenance, critical or otherwise, has been allowed to fall by the wayside. As for ‘my government’?” She lets her voice curdle. “I found out only two days ago myself. Rather than alert Parliament so that we might attempt to arrange trade from some other nation less affected by the blight, the Grain Authority chose to conceal their own negligence for as long as they could. You may trust me when I say that my reaction upon learning of this situation was not dissimilar from yours.”

“And that’s _still_ a failure of your government,” Levi says harshly.

Her lips draw back, but not in a smile. “At this point, Captain Ackerman, I honestly do not know what you expect me, or anyone else in ‘my government,’ to do for the Exploration Legion. I cannot simply conjure up sheaves of grain. Even if I could, its distribution is controlled by committee, and though I do head up that committee I cannot act independently of the other members. If it has given you a sense of relief to berate me, I am glad I could be of token service to a constituent. However, as you can see—” She inclines her head toward the stack of papers on her desk. “—I have a great deal of other work to attend to before my day has finished.”

Levi doesn’t shift a muscle except to speak. “Your other work can wait until I have something in writing from you that you’ll see it it my men are fed — and if not with grain, then from the private cellars and smokehouses of every noble in Sina. We lay down our lives for you. That’s the least you can do for us.”

She’s ceased to even attempt to conceal her hostility. “Not very many of you have ‘laid down your lives’ for the rest of us since the titans were eliminated,” she says flatly. “And, as you noted a moment ago, that was more than seven years in the past.”

“You wouldn’t fucking _be_ here, in this position of power, if it weren’t for the Survey Corps,” he nearly spits at her. “Whatever you did during the war that has all the other civilians so impressed, none of it would count for shit if it hadn’t been for our men not only killing titans but killing human beings. How many members of the Interior Squad did _you_ run a blade through, Mrs. Lehrer? Or take down with a rifle or a revolver or an arrow?”

She stares blankly at him for a moment. Then she pushes her chair back and rises to her full height. Armin knows it won’t intimidate Levi, who has not only stared down men who were taller than Margaret but cut down creatures that rose fifteen meters high. He’s sure she knows it too, her having dealt with Levi on a few occasions before. She is, rather, marking out the final limit of her patience.

“If it at all matters,” she says quietly, “I stabbed one when he attempted to rape me in an underground tunnel one night. Hopefully to death, but I turned and ran as soon as I pulled my knife from his belly, and I will probably never know.”

Armin is one of three people who has heard that story before. The second is Otthild; the third was the late Karsten Lehrer. Margaret has told Armin of her recurrent nightmare that it becomes widely known and made into a tavern ballad. If she is recounting it to Levi, it is not only because he has nicked her pride, but because she senses he will not be impressed enough to bother repeating it.

She continues, “As for your other point: No, I am sure I would not be in this office. That said, my understanding was that the Survey Corps overthrew the monarchy, and set to transitioning the Military Police and Garrison Legions into the Civil Police, in order to improve life for the citizens within the Walls. Not to take their place in the police state and merely reallocate the lion’s share of resources to themselves.” Her jaw is clenched tightly; Armin can see a muscle in it jumping. “We are trying to build a civil society, Captain. A representative republic. Your own commander and kinswoman is cognizant of this. Given that she sent you here to attempt to bully supplies out of me, rather than come to Sina herself to negotiate appropriately, perhaps she is hard pressed to keep order among her own people right now without her being present… but she understands that no promises have been made to the Exploration Legion, and that therefore no promises are being broken.”

For the very first time since Armin entered her office, Levi’s eyes slide to him. Speaking to Margaret but keeping his eyes on Armin, he says, “It certainly was _not_ my understanding that ‘no promises’ were made. Nor my commander’s, no matter what you think. Or… perhaps have been led to believe.”

Margaret’s face goes white. Armin’s stomach drops.

There is a silence in the little office that is probably no longer than a minute but seems to last a decade. Margaret seems to be forcefully restraining herself from looking at Armin. Levi continues to glare at him. Armin himself tries to keep his face composed and his breath steady.

When she finally speaks again, there is no emotion in her voice. “It is entirely possible that you, or Commander Ackerman, misconstrued a spoken offer from Lieutenant Arlert to try to be of whatever assistance he could in obtaining grain for your men. Distribution of grain, as I said earlier, is controlled by committee. Your former lieutenant sits on that committee, as do I, but he has even less power than I do to authorize a shipment on his own.”

“Quite to the contrary,” Levi says, his own voice dangerously level and quiet. “Lieutenant Arlert _assured_ our commander that he would be able to procure the grain for her. Due to his personal influence with you.”

For the first time, her eyes flick to Armin’s face, and what he sees in them makes a tiny voice in his mind begin to scream. _No. Oh, no. Please._

She doesn’t ask him whether Levi spoke the truth. She can read the answer in his face. Her own expression shutters tightly.

She looks back to Levi, and, with no more affect than a moment ago, she says, “He did not have the authority to make that promise, either to you or to your commander. As his senior parliamentarian and the head of the committee in question I apologize for his … overstep.” The last word crackles with anger, quickly suppressed. “However, as stated earlier, I can do nothing more for your Legion at this juncture. Again, your people will have to obtain their food from the wild for the foreseeable future. If and when we are able to trade for grain, the distribution will be reconsidered, but I would not recommend counting on that possibility. And with that, I regret I must bid you good day, Captain Ackerman.”

No Survey Corps officer survives for more than a few years, let alone a decade and a half, without learning when it will be less than useless to continue to press on rather than to retreat. Levi does not acknowledge Margaret’s dismissal, but neither does he continue to argue. Rather, he turns again to look at Armin, who served under him long enough to be able to read him and cannot mistake the contempt in his glare for anything else. For ten seconds he withers Armin with it. Then he turns on his heel and walks out without another word, shutting the door smartly behind him.

And once he’s gone, Armin finds that he doesn’t care what his old commanding officer thinks of him — has thought of him for the last five years, he knows. The only person whose esteem matters to him is sitting at her desk less than a meter away, her head lowered, the backs of her hands shielding her eyes from his view.

“Margaret,” he says hoarsely. He wants to move to her side, to touch her shoulder and her face. But he cannot comfort her. He is the reason she sits before him with her head in her hands.

When finally she raises her head, his heart shatters at the look in her eyes. It is not anger but pain. Radiating out from the corners of her eyes are lines he would swear were not there in the morning when she kissed him awake, warm and golden and softly, softly smiling. 

He has no defense now against the memory of other lines at the corners of other green-gold eyes. Angry red lines that soon faded to pink, then disappeared. Lines he himself didn’t put there. But lines on the face of a beloved he used and betrayed, all the same. A beloved who would never, ever forgive him.

“Get out of my office, Armin,” Margaret says with no intonation whatsoever.

*

“She doesn’t want to see you, Lieutenant,” Otthild says coldly on the other side of the townhouse door. 

“I'm not going away until she does.”

Armin’s voice is made ragged by cheap vine and, even more so, by four days of despair. They started with his return to this very doorway to find his overnight possessions, including several books, in a tightly latched portmanteau on the top step. They continued with an utter lack of acknowledgment from Margaret on the Parliament floor or in its hallways, every eye around them seeing it and every mouth around them whispering about it. Except for the mouths of his closest friends. Their looks of pity and concern, their questions of whether he’d like to stay with them for a few days, were if anything far more painful.

Each of those days concluded in his own cold, narrow bed, in a suite of rooms he has not slept in very often for the past five years. They have peaked with an empty bottle on his nightstand, what was once the lightest of weights in his trouser pocket gaining the ballast of a Wall stone, and his decision that by the end of the night he would muster the courage to do one of two things: pound on her door until he was let in, or fill his pockets with actual stones and walk into the river until it closed over his head.

“You won’t get past me,” Otthild snaps.

Armin simply pushes the door open, and with the momentum alone she stumbles backwards into the foyer, her eyes wide with shock. He knows he was wrong to do that: He’s trespassing, both legally and morally; he’s using bodily strength she doesn’t have. But as he glances at her, he suddenly understands Levi’s contempt for civilians in power. In the Survey Corps' finest moments, Armin was their smallest, their weakest, yet he’s lost count of how many titans he launched himself at. How many humans he shot down in cold blood. Otthild Weiler can’t even bar him from her boss’s house. She doesn’t attempt to grab him and hustle him outside; she didn’t even push back on the door. What good is the loyalty of someone who won’t put herself in the mildest of danger for another?

 _“Margaret!”_ he calls out, his voice echoing off plaster and tile. At this time of night she’s almost certainly upstairs.

“Get out!” Otthild hisses behind him. “I’ll summon the Civil Police!”

He remembers training a rifle on a Central MP eight years ago, watching the bullet lodge in the man’s thigh and the man drop screaming to the stones of the courtyard at his legion’s headquarters. He starts laughing, contemptuously and brokenly all at once. “Go ahead,” he says. “What are they going to do to me that’s worse than anything I’ve been through?”

Otthild says nothing, and a few seconds later there is no longer any point in her replying, for a light tread is coming down the stairs.

In nearly six years with her Armin has seen Margaret exhausted, enraged, grieving, ill. While in those states she did not look as good as she normally does, in none of them would he say she ever looked like hell. She looks like it now: face colorless where it isn’t red, eyes swollen, hair lackluster, and a few kilograms fallen away.

She doesn’t ask Armin why he’s here. She doesn’t bid Otthild to summon the CPs. She simply says, her voice emotionless and vaguely rheumy, “Go to bed, Otthild. I’ll deal with this.” _This._ Not even _him._

“Are you sure, ma'am?”

Margaret closes her eyes briefly. She is, Armin knows, only twenty-nine. She looks, in that split second, so much older.

“Yes,” she says.

“Remember to put out the sconces, ma’am,” Otthild says. At Margaret’s weary nod she walks out from behind Armin and mounts the stairs. She glares at him balefully as she passes behind Margaret and before she disappears into the upper floor. Her tread, hard and angry, echoes above them.

Margaret descends to the foot of the stairs, where she stands. She does not cross her arms nor square her shoulders. But she stands at full height, and though fatigue rather than anger radiates from her, not one centimeter of her promises to yield.

Finally she says, “I assume you came here to say something to me.”

“Margaret—” Armin draws a deep breath and closes his eyes. “Please.”

“‘Please' what?” She is too depleted even to make her voice cold and crisp; the words come out with no emotion behind them. “Please forget that you went behind my back and promised constituents things you have no authority to give? Please forget that you undermined my authority — an authority I cannot afford to have challenged, which you damn well know?”

Armin shakes his head. “What was I supposed to do? Mikasa is my— my oldest friend. You know they’re pushing her to quit the Legion, to get married and start having children. ‘New hands for new lands.’ They’re going to make the dissension in the ranks over the lack of grain out to be all her fault and replace her!”

“Who are they going to replace her with?” He’s not sure whether the sudden scorn in her voice is an improvement over the lack of affect. “Drag Zoë out of retirement, away from her three little kids _and_ her lab? Berner wouldn’t let her go, even if they wanted her back. Send Kirschtein or Freudenberg back from the CP to the EL? None of them would go; they’ve got their hands full with transition and reform plans, and they don’t walk away from what they start. The elder Ackerman?” Suddenly her voice could cut through steel. “All the smooth political prowess of the jumped-up gutter thug he is. And you? You don’t want to go back, and you know it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Armin says, despairing. “They’ll replace her with a man who has half her talents and twice her ambition, because he doesn’t ‘need’ to be at home making new warm bodies. He’ll have a wife to do that for him.”

“Which, of course, entirely justified your going behind my back,” Margaret snaps.

“She was desperate when I last saw her!” Armin pleads.

“Are you forgetting I _know_ Mikasa personally, that we have a very good working relationship? If she were that desperate she would have come to Sina to talk to me personally. She would never have put you in the middle like that. She would never have even hinted to you that maybe you could see what you could do for her. But you let her assume it was a done deal, and she sent Levi because she didn’t figure any diplomacy would be necessary.”

“Margaret—” The pitch of his voice is rising. Can a voice _un_ break, he wonders?

The pitch of hers, on the other hand, has plummeted like a stone. With the chill of an underground river she says softly, “When you left the Survey Corps, nearly everyone saw you as a hero. Nearly everyone. But you were teetering on the edge of disgrace with your comrades, _Lieutenant._ With your loved ones. The loved ones who were still speaking to you, that is.” His throat grows tight as she continues. “You’ve always wanted to bury that, haven’t you? What better way than to run for Parliament, then insinuate yourself into the good graces of an influential politician—”

_“Stop!”_

“—into her confidence. Into her _bed_ —”

He knew that accusation was coming, but to hear her speak it sets his skin alight with the ice-fire of shame. “Please,” he begs, voice cracking.

Her words are coming faster now, her anger heating and expanding like iron. “Into her _life_. _Knowing_ she planned for her life’s work to be transitioning this police state into a civil one. _Knowing_ you were asking favors for the most powerful surviving branch of the military.” And now her voice rises. “A branch rededicated to swallowing up new lands. Which takes money. Money that could’ve gone to building schools and clinics and sewers, goddamned _sewers,_ Armin, from being built so that civilians don’t have to die ignorant and sick and wallowing in their own shit.”

“New _farmlands!”_ Armin shouts, a genuine stab of anger cutting through his terror and grief. “So that civilians don’t have to choose between starvation or death by poisoned grain!”

She laughs bitterly. “New farmland needed to feed all the bodies required to defend it. Not from titans but from other nations. And from nature too. And it began within six months of the war’s end. We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the grain, we didn’t have enough healthy people, for God’s sake.” She pushes her face into one hand, and she sounds drained again. “We should have just rebuilt inward from Maria. We’d have been able to feed everyone, come blight or drought. Once we were all whole again, we could have reassessed.”

She raises her head; her eyes are hard and bright and tearless. “How much did you have to do with that decision, Armin, that I don’t know about?”

It’s his turn to laugh in despair. “I wasn’t even in Parliament yet! How much sway do you think I _had_ over that decision when it was made?”

Her mouth twists. “Parliament was barely on its feet by then. The decisions weren’t yet being made on the floor, and you damn well know it. God. My first instinct about you was right, wasn’t it? Except that I’d underestimated you.”

“Please,” he repeats, whispering now, unable to even wipe away the tears that have started to run down his face. “Margaret. I was wrong to make those promises to Mikasa. I was wrong. But, I swear, _never_ have I attempted to use you for my own gain, or that of the Exploration Legion. I love you. Holy Sina, you know I'm not lying about that, don’t you?”

When she looks at him he suddenly realizes she might not actually know. But that’s not what she says. She says, dully and with profound sorrow, “I wouldn’t be your first beloved you’d destroyed. Would I?”

Armin breaks. He turns from her, sobbing too hard to breathe, and leans against a wall for support. Wildly he wishes it would collapse atop him, and when it remains impassively sturdy he finds himself sliding down it until he’s sitting on the chilly tiles of the floor, hugging his knees to his chest. 

Five minutes pass, maybe ten, he’s not really counting. His gaps and sobs have quieted to steady breathing with only the occasional hitch. When Margaret next speaks her voice is still dull.

“What did you do to Eren Jaeger, Armin?”

He hadn’t, even unconsciously, expected her to ask this question. He has told her more than he has told anyone else in his life. Except, of course, Eren. But the open book he’s made of himself to her has always slammed shut at the mention of Eren’s name. As he breathes and sniffles and musters words, he realizes this question is nothing but the logical culmination of the last four days.

“You—” He gulps, steadying his voice. “You know about Gottfried Unruh. One of Kenny Ackerman’s lieutenants in the Interior Squad of the CMP. Or do you?”

“Yes,” she says. “The Survey Corps hunted him down to his home and killed him.”

“D-do you know _how_ he died?”

Margaret sighs. “Did you torture him to death? The Corps in general, or you personally?”

Armin shakes his head vigorously. “No.” His voice is still thick with tears. “Eren killed him. Eren in his titan form.”

There is a pause, and then she says softly, “Go on.”

“I— I knew Lieutenant Unruh had a family. A wife, two children. It was late at night. I knew they were home. They had to be home.” He swallows. “I… I lied. I told the other Corpsmen that they’d been sent out of Trost for their own safety. I didn’t think we had any choice but to go after Unruh with all we had.”

The pause goes on longer this time. Armin looks up at her and sees her regarding him with something dawning on horror. He laughs bitterly again. “Oh, no. It’s not what you’re thinking. Eren didn’t lay a finger on them. He would never have, not even as a titan.” His voice curls and corrodes. “Not even if I’d told him to.”

“So… what happened, then?”

Into the silence after she trails off, Armin whispers, “I watched it all from a nearby tree. Eren tore the roof off the house. Unruh was in the attic. The gust from the roof coming off set papers fluttering all around the attic and out of the house. Unruh was in the midst of them. And he’d set some of them afire in the hearth.

“Eren grabbed Unruh with his right hand, while with his left fist he smashed the remaining bricks of the hearth down over the fire. Then he spit into the embers. Some of the papers ended up burnt beyond legibility, of course, but—”

“—obviously enough evidence remained for a great many postwar trials of Central MPs,” Margaret sums up for him impatiently.

Armin nods miserably and takes another breath. “He— Eren. He picked up Unruh and tore his limbs off his body, one by one. Like a little boy pulling the legs off a fly. Then he pulled off his head and threw that and the torso down.”

“…And?” she whispers.

“He— he didn’t realize, while he was killing him, that Unruh’s wife and kids had run upstairs to the attic and were screaming for him to stop. He had his back to the house. Lots of people were screaming. There were bombs, there was gunfire— you know all this.” He shakes his head ruefully. “If he heard them while he was taking Unruh apart, it was just background noise. And then— he half-turned, to give his throwing arm some momentum, and it wasn’t until his hand had opened that he saw them. And what remained of Gottfried Unruh landed at the feet of his wife and children.”

He stops for a moment and breathes into the deafening silence, “The girl was eight. The boy was ten. And they saw it all. They saw a titan kill their father. They saw _Eren_ kill their father. And Eren knew they saw him do it.”

After a long moment, Margaret asks, “What happened then?”

Armin, staring at the floor, says, “He was frozen in shock. He— he knew, _knows,_ what war is, that sometimes the innocent die and their blood is on your hands. He had to have known that by destroying buildings he could have killed noncombatants, invalids, the old, children. Levi had told us we had to be prepared to dirty our hands, accept it, and move on. We didn’t talk about it much amongst ourselves… but we knew.”

He is quiet again for a few moments, then says, “I think, maybe, Eren might have dealt better with accidentally killing Unruh’s children than having had them watch him kill their father. The same way he and Mikasa watched the Smiling Titan kill his own mother.”

He inhales harshly again and says, “The first thing he did when the shock wore off was look at me, on the tree limb where I stood. There was rage in his eyes. And hate. He knew. He knew I’d known Unruh’s family would be home. He knew I lied. He looked at me for all of a second and I could read all of it in his eyes. And— and then he turned his back on me, and he ran, and I knew, Margaret, I _knew_ that he ran because his only alternative would have been to kill me. Maybe there was still a small bit of love left for me in his heart, or— or maybe he just didn’t want to look at me anymore, didn’t want to touch me, even to kill me.

“Levi took off after him and shouted for Mikasa and me to follow. I was in shock myself and I obeyed without thinking. Eren was running, but he was trying not to crush other houses under his feet, and that slowed him down. Levi landed on his shoulder and began to berate him. Eren turned his head and saw me hovering not far away, and — the rage reignited in his eyes, and he lashed his hand out for me with a roar. Mikasa shouted for him to stop, but he wouldn’t, not until Levi threatened to kill him. Which, by that time, Levi very much did _not_ want to do, and I could hear in his voice how much that threat cost him to make.

“Eren just stood there panting, glaring at me. Mikasa and Levi immediately understood why. She was slack-faced with horror. He looked at me like… the same way he looked at me in your office four days ago.

“And then Eren groaned, and his titan body crumpled. They cut him out of the nape. He was unconscious and slick with sweat and burning with fever, as ill as he’d ever been when he’d detransformed.” Armin swallows. “Levi ordered me back into battle, and he handed Eren over to Mikasa and ordered her to take him somewhere safe. She did. And… that was the last time I saw Eren, in either his human or his titan form.”

Armin falls silent and remains silent for another long stretch. Margaret does not press him, and he does not look at her for cues. At some point, he says softly, “I tried to visit him, twice, to beg his forgiveness. He wouldn’t see me. Mikasa would bar the door and tell me to leave. She… she was barely speaking to me, herself, for three or four months after it happened. Before his mother died, she charged Mikasa with his protection. Mikasa never imagined she’d have to protect him from me, and those few times I tried to see Eren, I could see in her eyes how deep the guilt cut.” 

He breathes in deeply. “I thought I’d lost them both for good. But Mikasa eventually sought me out to grant me forgiveness. She said she understood why I’d lied, that I thought I was doing the right thing, that I had no choice. She told me she loved me as much as Eren, that I was her family too. I must have cried for hours that day, with her arms around me.

“But Eren… Eren has never forgiven me. After Mikasa did, I mustered the courage to write to him. The letter came back in a second envelope marked ‘Return to Sender,’ and the words looked like they’d been written with a shaking hand. I might have tried again, if Mikasa hadn’t said to me some weeks later that Eren was depressed and ill for days after sending the letter back.”

He lapses back into silence, the longest one yet between them tonight. He flinches when he eventually hears the scuff of her kidskin slippers on the tiles. His heart pounds once, hard, when he sees her slippers by his side, and then she crouches to sit on the cold tiles next to him. A few millimeters still separate them, but her body warmth radiates out through her soft robe.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell you at first, when I found out for certain earlier this week,” she begins, then pauses.

“Tell me what?” he says, his voice slow and slurred. He’s surprised he’s only begun to slur his words now, given how much he’s had to drink and how hard he was weeping.

“The pessary must have slipped.” She pauses again. “I'm about six weeks pregnant.”

It hits him like a Wall falling onto him. At first he’s numb, not entirely sure he heard her right. The first emotion to seep through the shock is a sick, pallid fear.

“You... might not have told me?” he says.

She shakes her head. “No.” Her face is expressionless. “I was anticipating a choice of aborting a pregnancy — which is no longer so easy to do nowadays — that I very much want, by a man I very much love, no matter that he’d deeply abused my trust. Or having the child, tying myself to that man forever, and raising that child and trying not to poison his or her relationship with his father, and hoping he would extend the same courtesy to me.”

He goes cold to the core. How much he’s nearly cost himself is opening like an abyss under his body. He doesn’t dare look down, try to fathom the depth. What he hears himself say, pleadingly, is, “I… I would never have done that to you. To… to the child.”

She doesn’t reply, merely stares at the floor. He wonders if a curt retort from her would have been better than this, than nothing at all. He thinks of all the arguments he could muster in his defense before he realizes that not half an hour ago he handed her something of a counterargument: it would not, by far, be the worst thing he has ever done to a child.

And then he realizes that, perhaps, argument is beside the point, because she did in fact choose to tell him, and that maybe shutting the fuck up is the smartest thing he could do right now.

She eventually raises her head and looks at him. The brown and the green in them shift around within the bloodshot white. His own eyes, he’s sure, look just as awful. She reaches for his hand, and he seizes hers blindly. Their fingers entwine. He recalls that other thing which only he and Otthild know: Margaret was pregnant when Karsten Lehrer died. Not far along, perhaps even less than she is now. Two mornings after the attempted rape, she awoke in a storm of cramps and a welter of bloody sheets.

“So many people I’ve loved have been taken from me,” she says softly. “Maybe I’m an idiot to trust you again. Especially when I’ll be so vulnerable, both physically and politically. But… I can’t bear to start all over again, Armin. I just can’t. And…” She laughs bitterly. “I’m not getting any younger.”

His heart contracts hard and painfully. He can read her meaning in her words and her tone and from his history with her, that there is something worth salvaging between them. His mind can’t help but hear, _You’re better than nothing, I guess._ He pushes the thought away with a squeeze of her hand, which she returns.

“I can’t bear to, either,” he says. She could, he knows, wrest the same disheartening implication from his words that he just did from hers. But he also knows she can, she probably will, read beyond it. 

Knowledge of another’s heart, more precious than knowledge from heretical books. Knowledge worth salvaging.

He slips his hand into his trouser pocket and closes it around the tiny box. The nap of the velvet is thick and heavy against his palm as he draws the box out and opens the lid with a soft snap of the hinges. What it contains glimmers in the guttering light from the sconces.

She makes no resistance as he unentwines his other hand from hers and lines up the ring with the tip of her second finger. It has been bare for the last year and a half, the ring Karsten Lehrer gave her stowed away in her parents’ safe. She watches him ease the new ring down to the third joint. When he releases her, she lets her hand hang limply in the air, observing it as if it belonged to someone else. Drily she says, “This is not exactly how I imagined this would go.”

His mouth quirks. “I did manage to make it a bit more dramatic than the usual down-on-one-knee scene, didn’t I?”

“Quite the romantic, you are.” But the corner of her own mouth is twitching.

They sit together a while longer, moving closer and closer almost imperceptibly, until her head cranes over his and he rests his on her shoulder. He remembers his unspoken disappointment when he reached his full height and it still wasn’t within ten centimeters of hers. Margaret’s never cared about that, and eventually Armin stopped caring as well. Now he presses his cheek with gratitude into the warm, bony protrusion of her shoulder.

“I’ll ask Otthild to make up the guest bed for you,” she says eventually.

Armin jolts, stung. Even before he can open his mouth she grasps his reaction and glares at him. “I’m already getting nauseated in the mornings. I don’t need to wake up to someone who reeks like a tavern after a brawl. And you didn’t plan on getting laid tonight, did you? I’m hardly in the mood, and if you’re as drunk as I think you are…” She trails off meaningfully.

He pulls a twisted smile at a long-buried memory: he and Eren, seven years old and reading a book together. Dr. Jaeger’s office was off the living room of the Jaegers’ house, and he was in there with Hannes that day. Armin recalls the sarcastic voice on the other side of the door: _Ever think you’d be able to get it up more often if you weren’t pounding down three bottles of vine a day?_ Eren and Armin looked at one another in puzzlement — get _what_ up? — then decided later that Eren’s father had probably meant “get up out of bed.”

“I am, I think,” he says now, a split second before realizing that he has thought of Eren for the first time in more seven years, with no worse than a bittersweet ache to trail the thought.

“You should take a shower, too,” Margaret says, rising carefully.

“I will. But… I can make up the bed myself. I know where the linens are.” Even if Otthild is still lying awake, which he strongly suspects she is, he’s sure she’ll be none too happy to wait on him.

He registers this reasoning, and her approval thereof, in Margaret’s gaze. Something inside his breast shifts and softens for the first time in days. A form of grace, that wordless understanding, in this life he’s chosen of calculating every word he utters, every expression on his face, every move and countermove. A comrade, as much as those who have ever stood beside him with their own fists pressed to their hearts.

She walks the perimeter of the room, lifting the glass cup of each sconce to blow out the candle, then gently lowering it again. When she returns to Armin’s side, she holds out her hand, and he takes it as he rises. Stone and metal imprint against the ball of his hand, cold and hard and sweet, as he lets her lead him up the stairs.


End file.
